Green500 Finds IBM Supercomputers are Most Energy-Efficient in the World

IBM supercomputers are the most energy-efficient in the world, according to the latest Supercomputing "Green500 List" announced earlier this month by Green500.org. The Green500 list is published by Green500.org. It provides a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world and serves as a complementary view to the TOP500 list of worldwide supercomputers by Top500.org.

"Supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance. The era of simply adding more processors is coming to a close," explains David Turek, vice president, deep computing, IBM. "Clients need to be able to run supercomputers anywhere, not only places that have cheap power. As the Green500 proves, IBM has focused on this issue for some time and is well positioned to usher in performance breakthroughs along with efficiency gains."

Energy efficiency-including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding workloads-is a core design principle in developing IBM systems. IBM offers the broadest range of generally applicable supercomputers represented on the Green500 List including Blue Gene, Power servers, iDataPlex, BladeCenter and hybrid clusters.

The Green500 list shows that 18 of the top 20 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high-performance computing technology. The list includes supercomputers from Saudi Arabia to Germany and the United States that are being used for a variety of applications such as astronomy, climate prediction and pharmaceutical research. IBM also holds 69 of the top 100 positions on this list.

The number-one most energy-efficient system in the world-a supercomputer built at the Julich supercomputing center in Germany as part of a collaboration between IBM and an academic consortium of universities and research centers-produces more than 723 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy.

The IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratories-which first broke through the petaflop barrier and was second on the recently announced Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers-is ranked the sixth most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world, capable of over 444 Mflops per watt of energy. A non-IBM supercomputer that topped the Top500 list placed 44 on the Green500 List, producing only 253 Mflops per watt.

More information about the Green500 List is available here. More information about IBM and HPC Solutions can be found here.